12.21.2005

A letter writer in today's Strib asks: "Who is the National Security Agency spying on? Names chosen from a phone book? Political opponents? From what I gather from limited news reports, the numbers and e-accounts that were monitored were discovered in places like the hard drives and phone books of captured Al-Qaida operatives. It seems to me the only people in 'danger' are those who cooperate with terrorists."

Think again. FBI documents released by the ACLU yesterday outline numerous surveillance and intelligence-gathering operations targeting lawfully assembling groups like the Catholic Worker Movement and Greenpeace. The Catholic Workers, founded by Dorothy Day on the radical "belief in the God-given dignity of every human person," were targeted because of their "semi-communistic ideology." The documents reveal that the FBI's counterterrorism agents monitored the activities of groups dealing with the environment, poverty reduction, peace activism, and animal cruelty. The ACLU suspects that as many as 150 protest and social justice groups may have been improperly monitored by the feds.

1 comment:

I definitely think there's something else going on regarding the NSA program that's not being discussed (very) publicly. Once I read this explanation, everything that public officials said when they were trying to skirt around the details of the program made perfect sense:

http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20051220-5808.html

For example, last night on the Newshour a former CIA official was saying that while terrorists knew their conversations could be monitored, they didn't know the US was as good as they are at doing it, and that there wouldn't be enough time to get all the warrants necessary (due to the sheer number, not the 72 hour deadline). Which, to me, fits this theory quite well.

Paul Schmelzer is web editor at the Walker Art Center, creator of Signifier, signed, a former editor at Adbusters and contributor to Artforum.com, Cabinet, Raw Vision, The Progressive, Utne and others.More >>